Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

This looks like a great idea, and I imagine the execution will be great.

Personally, though, I find no excitement in building a log searching tool. Something a bit more magical (I think something involving web scraping or markov chains would be interesting) would probably entice people to move forward much more.

Not that this tool wouldn't be useful, just that if I look at the end result, it doesn't give me the want to build it.

View on HN

If your career starts out as a developer, there are going to be things you have to work on that you find no excitement in (gross generalisation of course, but true for the overwhelming majority of developers I'd say).

It wasn't until I got tasked with writing something I had no interest in as part of a recruitment process that I realised programming would always be a hobby for me, not a profession.

The sooner one realises that, the better I'd say!

But if it's a hobby, why not do fun things? It's not like this is "Get a career in programming the hard way".

Just out of curiosity... I would love to know what you did choose as a profession.

I agree, but it looks like there will be more projects coming. I teach a class aimed at exactly this "Codecademy chasm" and tend to use small, practical apps e.g. parsing San Francisco street sweeping data or getting the weather forecast. I'm pretty sure most of my students have no idea what logs are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com